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Friday, September 30, 2011

You will find that this blog is a to some extent two differing worlds. There is the world of the blogposts that I make, which consist primarily of news and scientific treatises and articles full of evidence. Then there is the underworld of the comments threads, where mostly anonymous commenters attack this blogger's education, intellect, character and sanity while making baseless assertions and asking less-than-reasonable questions. Some of you never go to the comments threads because that is the way most blogs work. So I will tell you that, in the comments thread, if you have not gone there you will find a great deal of derision and self-congratulatory hooting about how silly it is to doubt Darwinism.

Well, here is part one of a two-part (?) video blog from the noteworthy Creationist, Scientist and erstwhile adventurer Ian Juby in which he interviews six scientists who were once dedicated Darwinists...until they actually looked at the EVIDENCE. Oh, that...evidence.

Since most of you do not read the comments threads, I will share a little. One commenter tried to tell me that scientists generally agree that life came from non-life. I suspect that Louis Pasteur would have set him straight. But when I asserted that NO scientist has EVER come up with a way life can come from non-life because of the hard biochemical barriers that prevent it, one of them pointed me to one Dr. Jack Szostak. Of course I knew he had not come up with a plausible scenario because I have thoroughly investigated the problem myself and read numerous papers on it and have published some of that information here on the blog. But if you want a hoot? Go to his bio page at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Here is the beginning:

"How did life begin? Scientists may never know exactly how a swirl of chemicals came together to form the first living organisms some 4 billion years ago, but Jack Szostak is working to recreate a hypothetical model of this process in the laboratory."

Actually, real scientists proved that life only comes from life back in the 19th Century. The Law of Biogenesis was established and that law has NEVER BEEN BROKEN. God made life. Louis Pasteur and numerous colleagues established this through many decades of experiments and it remains true today. Scientism consists of a guy in a laboratory trying to design life and pretend that would prove it happened by chance? It would be funny if it was not so tragic. Imagine what a good mind like Jack Szostak could be doing if he wasn't playing mad scientist with amino acids?

In any event, another scientist with a good mind, Ian Juby, has a terrific website and on the front page he declares who he is:

I have also had extensive personal studies in Origins for about the past eighteen years.On this home page you can see and sometimes download projects I have collected for design and tech programs, read some of my creation science notes, check out my itinery for creation science presentations or book a presentation for your church, youth or private group.

"God cannot be a figment of my imagination because He is not at all what I imagined Him to be."
-C.S. Lewis

"People prefer to believe what they prefer to be true."
-Sir Francis Bacon

"The bible does not say 'Be Ye transformed by the removal of your mind'"
-Winkie Pratney

"That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
-Calvin

So I present to you about 43 minutes of video in which we meet six scientists who were Darwinists and who now realize that Darwinism is just like the Emperor's New Clothes...

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

An atheist was seated next to a little girl on an airplane and he turned to her and said, "Do you want to talk? Flights go quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger."

The little girl, who had just started to read her book, replied to the total stranger, "what would you want to talk about?"

"Oh, I don't know," said the atheist. "How about why there is no god, or no heaven or hell, or no life after death?" as he smiled smugly.

"OK," she said. "Those could be interesting topics but let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same stuff - grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, but a horse produces clumps. Why do you suppose that is?"

The atheist, visibly surprised by the little girl's intelligence, thinks about it and says, "Hmm, I have no idea."

To which the little girl replies, "do you really feel qualified to discuss why there is no god, or no heaven or hell, or no life after death, when you don't know crap?

Sunday, September 25, 2011

"There is only one explanation for these observations: (1) evolutionism cannot be falsified, (2) evolutionary theory assumes what it needs to prove, (3) evolutionists continue to maintain such passion about their theory, and (4) evolutionary theory relies on miracles: things originate, appear, emerge, develop, and arise. The explanation: evolution is a religion masquerading as science.

On that topic, learn about Darwin’s religious views in this new article by Richard Weikart on American Thinker. Coupled with Richard Dawkins’ oft-quoted statement that Darwinism allows one to become an intellectually-fulfilled atheist, it’s no wonder that Darwin’s disciples are so militant in their faith and energetic about keeping the real motivations hidden behind a facade of false-front scientific evidence to support their religion." - from the post Evolution Fits Any Data

"Darwinism is a religion masquerading as science. The high priests of Darwinism believe that the public is either too stupid or too lazy to investigate their claims, so they make deceptive and preposterous statements based entirely on beliefs rather than scientific evidence." - Radar

Be sure to check out the end of the post where many scientists, most of them Darwinists, make admissions that Darwinism doesn't really line up with evidence.

Truth is that, if you have ever had a teacher who told you that life could have come from non-life, they were giving you a fairy tale (Pasteur used the word "chimera" which translates best as a bad dream). They had deliberately abandoned science and stepped into the world of religion. That life could come from non-life is far too unlikely to have ever happened and then, when you consider how many different kinds of life there are and multiple variations thereof, preposterous is not a strong enough word for it. Even when Darwin was first positing his hypothesis he did not try to propose a natural start to life, but rather began with the concept of simple life evolving into more complex life. It was the drive of atheists demanding a replacement for God that brought the world of secular science into the land of Tooth Fairies and Easter Bunnies. Spontaneous Generation of life has already been disproven, so Darwinists renamed it Chemical Evolution and continue to pretend that there is hope of finding a way it could have happened. World? The check is in the mail...yeah, right!

Intentional liars like Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel and Charles Lyell helped popularize a hypothesis by the classically deceptive Charles Darwin that should not be believed by anyone with half a brain.

Huxley was willing and able to invent a life form that did not exist, Bathybius haeckelii, in order to promote Darwinism. The Duke of Argyll complained that Huxley and other Darwinists were promoting a "reign of terror" to bully and silence opponents of Darwinism. Gee, that hasn't changed yet!

Darwin was motivated by an antipathy towards God and it was worldview and not science that prodded him to produce his hypothesis, one partially stolen from Creationists and unbelievers alike.

Haeckel made a faked embryo chart that sometimes still appears in textbooks despite being obviously faked and deceptive. He wanted to promote his favorite lie: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny.

Darwinists have no respect for your ability to think and reason for yourselves. They think that critical thinking is dead and that the ordinary person isn't going to question their propaganda. So they treat you, the student or the parent or whatever stage of life you are in, as if you are just plain dumb. Their method is pretty simple. They assert that no one but a total idiot would believe in God. Then they ignore the actual evidence and tell just-so stories that only a total idiot would believe if the entire story was told. They tell you that with infinite time (which we do not have) anything could happen. Why should you have to suffer all this lying and deception just to keep them company? Why should you believe the cobbled-together Darwinist dogma when Creation makes far more sense?Darwinism is not science, it is nonsense!

You have 100 trillion cells in your body. For every cell you have, you probably have ten companion organisms like bacteria, archaea and fungi. Darwinists cannot explain how even one simple organism of the simplest kind could have ever naturally formed. In fact every experiment ever done continually proves over and over again that it cannot happen. Meanwhile they expect you to believe you evolved???? Really? For a one-celled "simple" living organism is statistically impossible and you are 100 trillion times impossible and have ten times that many "friends" along for the ride?

You want to call this an argument from incredulity? Sorry. An argument from incredulity requires that a person does not have the imagination to comprehend a possibility. Darwinists have continually asserted that life came from non-life, which breaks the Law of Biogenesis and this law has been proved over and over again billions upon billions of times. The laws of statistics have told us that life coming from non-life is a statistical impossibility and the food industry of the 19th Century and forward along with countless lab experiments have continually proven that the Law of Biogenesis is true. At some point Darwinists have to give up on their fairy tales and admit that life cannot come from non-life. But they do not do this because the only other answer is that God created. God created is the Occam's Razor answer, it is the scientific answer and it is the obvious answer. But it doesn't fit into the Atheist's religious point of view. Atheists cannot allow for the idea of God at any point. Once God gets involved then everything they assert is cast aside and the entire preposterous Rube Goldberg Machinery of Darwinism is exposed as a house of canards. It was Christians who were the first modern scientists and there are plenty of them working in science today.

The fossil layers do not support Darwinism. In fact every layer found is a catastrophic layer, the layers are not stacked up neatly in order at all. The standard geological column is a fake. In the real world, layers are "out of order" or flip-flopped or missing or even go back and forth. There are numerous polystrate fossils that falsify uniformitarianism. Megabreccias also tell us of a huge flood event, not long ages. Beyond that, it makes no sense that there would be layers that suddenly and neatly yield to a new layer of another color and composition. Was the world red for awhile then gray for awhile then yellow for awhile? I don't have to link to past blogposts, I have covered every single aspect of the sedimentary layers. Ian Juby was able to do experiments that proved a global flood would make the kinds of sedimentary layers we see. The Mt. St. Helens events showed the world how catastrophic massive flows could carve a canyon like the Grand Canyon and lay down multiple so-called varves in minutes rather than years. Since every fossil layer has indications of catastrophism, so only the public's slow learning curve keeps Darwinists from having to answer hard questions.

But seriously, folks, since we know life cannot come from non-life you need God to create life. If He created life, why should we not believe He created it the way He wanted it? Is there any plausible explanation from Darwinists for the process of photosynthesis, of multiple symbiotic relationships, of the neck of the giraffe or the explosive cannon of the bombardier beetle or the inbred ability of the brush turkey to keep a big pile of dirt and twigs and leaves at an exact temperature and humidity? How do monarch butterflies know to go down to Mexico where they never have been? How do flights of migratory birds know how to use a formation that cuts down the drag on the trailing birds so that they can take turns in the lead and they can all thereby fly farther? How did humans manage to arrange to give homes to bacteria that help us digest our food and where did they live before there were people if people actually evolved? A woodpecker has a specially insulated brain that keeps it from destroying said brain while their beaks hammer at trees. Do we see any transitional woodpecker skulls, or beetles beginning to have a bomb factory, or birds learning to build tiny mounds and working their way up? Do we see any half-giraffes?

Look into the cell. The ATP synthase motor system must be in place for a cell to exist. A cell cannot exist without it. DNA is required to code for building a cell, but a cell is required to hold DNA. Most people have not studied cells and do not understand that cells are far more complex than the most modern and largest factory made by man. Most folks don't understand that cells and for that matter DNA require constant monitoring and repair and that the repair mechanisms are all built into the cell because they are coded for by the DNA that needs the cell that needs the ATP synthase motor that needs the...need I go on? Darwinists cannot even find a way to explain the formation of a string of proteins by natural means and they expect you to believe that, by chance, untold billions of creatures consisting of untold trillions of cells just kind of happened? Even one cell is too much!

Understand this is a slow-motion recreation? In actuality a cell is moving a high speed constantly repairing and producing new parts to replace old, moving in myriad ways continually while you blithely go about your business not realizing that you are a walking miracle. You are alive (Darwinists have no explanation for life) and you live in a Universe (that Darwinists cannot explain) that seems to be designed specifically for you to exist while massive amounts of information (Darwinists have no source for information, either) existing within your cells and specifically in your DNA give the orders that not only told your body how to build itself but also has the instructions that keep every cell in your body living moment-to-moment. You don't need to think about making your heart beat. You will naturally breath if you do not decide to stop it (and just try holding your breath until you pass out) but what is truly amazing is that all these trillions of cells that make up all the systems of your body and also the tiny electrical impulses constantly firing across your nervous system and within your brain are happening without you having to think about them.

The only thing Darwinists have going for them is that they present an alternative to a Creator God. Their hypothesis doesn't fit the available evidence at all. I am asserting this now, but several years of blogposts on every conceivable part of this assertion stand in testimony to the truth of what I now say. You, a thinking human being, should consider carefully whether you are going to keep taking the propaganda being served up to you or whether you will dare to think for yourself and investigate rather than simply accept?

You will not read these facts in the newspapers or the popular press. But scientists are wringing their hands over the lack of evidence or mechanisms for how life forms on our planet could have originated. Evolutionary theory is unworkable. It is a myth. This is science vs. evolution—a Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, brought to you by Creation Science Facts.

In the list below, full caps at the beginning of a hyperlink show it begins a new page.CONTENTS: Scientists Speak about the Primitive Environment

This material is excerpted from the book, PRIMITIVE ENVIRONMENT.
An asterisk ( * ) by a name indicates that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations in the books this Encyclopedia is based on, only 164 statements are by creationists.You will have a better understanding of the following statements by scientists if you will also read the web page, Primitive Environment.

"It is almost invariably assumed that animals with bodies composed of a single cell represent the primitive animals from which all others derived. They are commonly supposed to have preceded all other animal types in their appearance. There is not the slightest basis for this assumption."—*Austin Clark, The New Evolution (1930), pp. 235-236.

"The hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic matter is, at present, still an article of faith."—*J.W.N. Sullivan, The Limitations of Science (1933), p. 95.
"Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must have been created by some omnipotent intelligence."—*D.J. Futuyma, Science on Trial (1983), p. 197.
"With the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past."—*Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey (1957), p. 199.
"Since Darwin's seminal work was called The Origin of Species one might reasonably suppose that his theory had explained this central aspect of evolution or at least made a shot at it, even if it had not resolved the larger issues we have discussed up to now. Curiously enough, this is not the case. As Professor Ernst Mayr of Harvard, the doyen [senior member] of species studies, once remarked, the `book, called The Origin of Species, is not really on that subject' while his colleague, Professor Simpson, admits: `Darwin failed to solve the problem indicated by the title of his work.'
"You may be surprised to hear that the origin of species remains just as much a mystery today, despite the efforts of thousands of biologists. The topic has been the main focus of attention and is beset by endless controversies."—*Gordon R. Taylor, Great Evolution Mystery (1983), p. 140.
"Mathematics and dynamics fail us when we contemplate the earth, fitted for life but lifeless, and try to imagine the commencement of life upon it. This certainly did not take place by any action of chemistry, or electricity, or crystalline grouping of molecules under the influence of force, or by any possible kind of fortuitous concourse of atmosphere. We must pause, face to face with the mystery and miracle of the creation of living things."—Lord Kelvin, quoted in Battle for Creation, p. 232.
"We are left with very little time between the development of suitable conditions for life on the Earth's surface and the origin of life . . Life apparently arose about as soon as the Earth became cool enough to support it."—*S.J. Gould, "An Early Start," in Natural History, February 1978.

"Biogenesis is a term in biology that is derived from two Greek words meaning life and birth. According to the theory of biogenesis, living things descend only from living things. They cannot develop spontaneously from nonliving materials. Until comparatively recent times, scientists believed that certain tiny forms of life, such as bacteria, arose spontaneously from nonliving substances."—*"Biogenesis," in World Book Encyclopedia, p. B-242 (1972 edition).
"Pasteur's demonstration apparently laid the theory of spontaneous generation to rest permanently.
"All this left a germ of embarrassment for scientists. How had life originated after all, if not through divine creation or through spontaneous generation? . .
"They [scientists] are [today] back to spontaneous generation."—*Isaac Asimov, Asimov's New Guide to Science (1984), pp. 638-639.
"His aphorism `omnis cellula e cellula' [every cell arises from a pre-existing cell] ranks with Pasteur's `omne vivum e vivo' [every living thing arises from a pre-existing living thing] as among the most revolutionary generalizations of biology."—*Encyclopedia Britannica, 1973 Edition, Volume 23, p. 35.
" `Every cell from a cell.' "—Rudolf Vircho, German pathologist. `Every living thing from a living thing.' `Spontaneous generation is a chimera [illusion].'—Louis Pasteur, French chemist and microbiologist." Quotations in Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), p. 193.

Chemical compounds would not have been rich enough.
"It is commonly assumed today that life arose in the oceans . . But even if this soup contained a goodly concentration of amino acids, the chances of their forming spontaneously into long chains would seem remote. Other things being equal, a diluted hot soup would seem a most unlikely place for the first polypeptides to appear. The chances of forming tripeptides would be about one-hundredth that of forming dipeptides, and the probability of forming a polypeptide of only ten amino acid units would be something like 1 / 1020. The spontaneous formation of a polypeptide of the size of the smallest known proteins seems beyond all [mathematical] probability."—H.F. Blum, Time's Arrow and Evolution (1968), p. 158.
"If there ever were a primitive soup, then we would expect to find at least somewhere on this planet either massive sediments containing enormous amounts of the various nitrogenous organic compounds, amino acids, purines, pyrimidines, and the like, or alternatively in much metamorphosed sediments we should find vast amounts of nitrogenous cokes . . In fact, no such material has been found anywhere on earth . . There is, in other words, pretty good negative evidence that there never was a primitive organic soup on this planet that could have lasted but a brief moment."—*J. Broks and *G. Shaw, Origins and Development of Living Systems (1973), p. 360.

Enzyme inhibitors would surely have been present and would quickly have destroyed that which had been produced.
"It is clear that enzymes were not present in the primordial soup. Even if they were formed, they would not have lasted long since the primeval soup was, by definition, a conglomeration of nearly every conceivable chemical substance. There would have been innumerable enzyme inhibitors present to inhibit an enzyme as soon as it appeared. Thus, such molecules could not have formed; however, even with the assumption that they had formed, they could not have remained."—David and Kenneth Rodabaugh, Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 1990, p. 107.

Rapid fluid loss would not have occurred.
"One well-known problem in the formation of polymerized proteins in water is that water loss is necessary for this process. Living organisms solve this problem with the presence of enzymes and the molecule ATP. It is clear the enzymes were not present in the primordial soup."—David and Kenneth Rodabaugh, Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 1990, p. 107.
"Beneath the surface of the water there would not be enough energy to activate further chemical reactions; water in any case inhibits the growth of more complex molecules."—*Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe (1982), p. 65.

If oxygen were present, the required chemicals would quickly decompose.
"First of all, we saw that the present atmosphere, with its ozone screen and highly oxidizing conditions, is not a suitable guide for gas-phase simulation experiments."—*A. Oparin, Life: Its Nature, Origin and Development, p. 118.
"The synthesis of compounds of biological interest takes place only under reducing conditions [that is, with no free oxygen in the atmosphere]."—*Stanley Miller and *Leslie Orgel, The Origins of Life on the Earth (1974), p. 33.
"With oxygen in the air, the first amino acid would never have gotten started; without oxygen, it would have been wiped out by cosmic rays."—*Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe (1982), p. 65.

Just producing the needed proteins would be an impossible task.
"The conclusion from these arguments presents the most serious obstacle, if indeed it is fatal to the theory of spontaneous generation. First, thermodynamic calculations predict vanishingly small concentrations of even the simplest organic compounds. Secondly, the reactions that are invoked to synthesize such compounds are seen to be much more effective in decomposing them."—*D. Hull, "Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Spontaneous Generation," in Nature, 186 (1960), pp. 693-694.
"In other words, the theoretical chances of getting through even this first and relatively easy stage [getting amino acids] in the evolution of life are forbidding."—*Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe (1982), p. 65.
"In the vast majority of processes in which we are interested, the point of equilibrium lies far over toward the side of dissolution. That is to say, spontaneous dissolution [atomic self-destruction process] is much more probable, and hence proceeds much more rapidly, than spontaneous synthesis [accidental put-together process] . . The situation we must face is that of patient Penelope waiting for Odysseus, yet much worse: Each night she undid the weaving of the preceding day, but here a night could readily undo the work of the year or a century."—*G. Wald, "The Origin of Life," in The Physics and Chemistry of Life (1955), p. 17.

Not even the scientists know how to produce the required fatty acids. Yet sand and seawater are said to have figured out the process.
"No satisfactory synthesis of fatty acids is at present available. The action of electric discharges on methane and water gives fairly good yields of acetic and propionic acids, but only small yields of the higher fatty acids. Furthermore, the small quantities of the higher fatty acids that are found are highly branched."—*S. Miller and *L. Orgel, The Origins of Life on the Earth (1974), p. 98.

A reducing atmosphere (one without oxygen) would be required, yet it would produce peroxides, which are lethal to living creatures.
"The hypothesis of an early methane-ammonia atmosphere is found to be without solid foundation and indeed is contradicted."—*P. Abelson, "Some Aspects of Paleobiochemistry," in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 69 (1957), p. 275.

A continuous supply of energy would, from the very first, be required.
"To keep a reaction going according to the law of mass action, there must be a continuous supply of energy and of selected matter (molecules) and a continuous process of elimination of the reaction products."—*P. Mora, "The Folly of Probability," in Origins of Prebiological Systems and their Molecular Matrices, Ed, S.W. Fox (1965), p. 43.

There are other amazing aspects to life. For example, where did the built-in intelligence come from?
"Any living thing possesses an enormous amount of `intelligence' . . Today, this `intelligence' is called `information,' but it is still the same thing . . This `intelligence' is the sina qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. Where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers, and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it."—*Pierre-Paul de Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms (1977), p. 3.

There can be only one solution to the mystery of how living creatures originated.
"Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts." —*Francis Crick, Life Itself (1981), p. 153. [Crick received a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.]
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle."—*Francis Crick, Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981), p. 88.
"All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe, as an article of faith, that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did."—*Harold C. Urey, quoted in Christian Science Monitor, January 4, 1962, p. 4.
"All the facile speculations and discussions published during the last ten to fifteen years explaining the mode of origin of life have been shown to be far too simple-minded and to bear very little weight. The problem in fact seems as far from solution as it ever was."—*Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe (1982), p. 68.
"The probability of life origination from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop." —*Edwin Conklin, Reader's Digest, January 1963, p. 92.
"From the probability standpoint, the ordering of the present environment into a single amino acid molecule would be utterly improbable in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life."—*American Scientist, January, 1955.
"Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century . . The origin of life and of new beings on earth is still largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle."—*Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), p. 358.FOR MORE INFORMATION:
To the next topic in this series: WHY LIFE COULD NOT SELF-ORIGINATE: 30 scientific reasons why it could not happen

Wile E. Coyote demonstrates graphically the typical Darwinist trying to explain the formation of life from non-life...or existence from non-existence:

One of my favorite things is to post evidence for Creationism and then listen to the Darwinists scramble to naysay with various means and methods, very few of which involve actual evidence but generally involve derision, ad hominem attacks, Darwinist just-so stories not supported by evidence and the myths of evolution that require the geological column that doesn't exist, transitional forms that are not transitional, sequential fossils which don't actually manage to be truly sequential and so on and so forth. Where Darwinists fail most miserably is when they try to explain existence, life and information. For instance, the idea of life forming by chance is preposterous from a scientific point of view:

But actually Darwinism is an odd construct anyway. It was a belief in the Logical Creator that caused the early great scientists (believers in God almost always) to expect to be able to observe the Universe and identify processes and causes and rules and laws. No one doubted that God had made man unlike any other animal, as we have the ability to think abstractly and also comprehend morality and know right and wrong. You can teach animals what gets rewarded or punished but only mankind demonstrates an understanding and an innate sense of right and wrong.

This has been something of a curse as, when we were innocent, we couldn't actually DO anything wrong since we were unaware. I wonder how long Adam and Eve were alive before the Fall? A week? A year? Decades? Genesis does not tell us this. I have learned that the Bible is accurate about the things it addresses in terms of science and yet it is not primarily a textbook for science. It is accurate concerning history but it is not a complete history of mankind because it focuses primarily on the predecessors and ancestors of the occupants of the Ark and, after that, mostly on the family of Shem and specifically the descendents of Israel on down to the time of Jesus Christ. At that point it gives an overview of the history of the early church and instructions for Christian living for those who are born again.

In any event, if we truly were just accidents and the result of a series of lucky, fluke accidents (the odds of this are so incomprehensibly small that statistically it is quite impossible, so never let a Darwinist tell you they do not believe in miracles, as their hypothesis requires billions of miracles to happen quite by chance) then what we think and do is the result of electrical impulses that have evolved so that we actually do not have a choice, we simply do what we have evolved to do and thinking is all a matter of blind obedience to the tyranny of our ancestry. We have evolved to do and think or seemingly think without understanding that we actually have no free will at all, what we do is what we have evolved to do. In fact, how does a Darwinist actually determine that he exists at all? He thinks everything came from nothing by no means, so how does he know that he is anything more than a dream himself? What absolutes can a Darwinist stand upon?

One way of looking at my life before becoming a Christian is this; that I could not find real purpose and meaning in life so I decided that until (or if) that changed, I was going to party my butt off and live for myself and let the chips fall where they may. I had investigated various Protestant churches and gone to the Catholic and Greek Orthodox church. Lots of incomprehensible traditions but nothing tangible or compelling. Eastern religions required a reboot of the brain to grok what they taught, but what they taught did not answer the questions. How and why are we here?

I got into mysticism, into witchcraft and devil worship. I tried chanting and martial arts. I tried finding God or self-actualization or just inspiration from a wide variety of hallucinogenic drugs. Considered the possibilities of magic or the development of an inner self into a person of power and worked quite hard at being able to do parlor tricks with my mind. Telekinesis, in other words. I even had the Boo-Hoo Bible and tried to use it as directed, which involves lots of LSD, the BHB itself and a television station turned to a random channel. Books like Journey to Ixtlan and A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig were among the stuff I poured into my head along with more "classic" works by Rand and Nietzsche and Skinner and Huxley and Kafka and the ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle and so on and so forth. Was there a God? Was God the sum of all things? Was God a power within me? Were there aliens, or were there demons, for there had to be one of the other! There was power or powers out there, could I find it/them/Him?

My good fortune was that, no matter what hallucinogen I ingested I never lost complete control of the steering wheel of my mind. Never did I not realize I was on a trip and experiencing visions and other senses that were either quite warped or totally nonexistent. I could drive while on LSD. I went to work in the Pentagon one day while tripping on LSD. Mushrooms, various kinds of Peyote, pot, hash, coke, heroin, speed, downers, alcohol, horse tranquilizer, it didn't matter. I was testing limits and exploring, trying to obey the urges of the Amboy Dukes to journey to the center of my mind and seek truth there. I wound up being a junkie living on the street about to either starve to death or die of exposure. I volunteered to go get off the speed cold turkey, lived through a few days of hell on Earth and came out vowing never to stick a needle in my body again.

But it didn't change much. I kept a steady job but at work I was always high and always drinking. I smoked pot on every break while guzzling beer and snuck vodka or gin into my can of pop while on the factory floor. I would roll a joint and smoke it upon awaking every day. I would almost certainly do a doobie before I went to sleep. I went out to bars and got very drunk to the point of often blanking out many hours at one time. I would wake up on a cold bathroom floor in a pool of my own vomit. One time I woke up while at the steering wheel actually driving down a sidewalk right before I was about to go smack into a telephone pole. On the other side of the road was a river. I came to just in time to swerve and miss the pole and drive right back on the road. Did that bring me to my senses? No.

I didn't realize what I was doing, but I was being the Prodigal Son. In Luke, Jesus uses stories to explain to the Pharisees and Sadducees as well as all the other listeners about the concept of seeking to find and restore the lost. He talks about a lost sheep and a lost coin. Then he begins a story about a man who had two sons, in Luke 15starting with verse 11:

11 Then He said: “A certain man had two sons. 12 And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood. 13 And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living.

I had all sorts of inheritance from my parents. Both of them were smart and talented. My father went to college on an art scholarship and had been a basketball and football star in high school, but he left college to fight in the Korean War. My mother was also an artist and a gifted singer who might have been expected to go to Hollywood to become a star or perhaps New York, cutting her teeth as a band singer before getting a shot at fame. But she chose to be a housewife and a mother. She still sang professionally for 50 years and appeared on television and radio in Chicago and South Bend, Indiana. She spent time teaching me to read and write before I made it to kindergarten. When I was going into fourth grade I was sent to a school with an "enriched curriculum" for gifted kids. I had inherited the ability to sing and also to write and had the brainpower to make straight A's without really working too hard.

Some of you will think I am bragging when I say I could sing as well or better than the average lead singer in the rock bands of my day and I was a brainiac who always tested out at 99 percentile. But actually those were, like the prodigal son, riches that I wasted on getting high and chasing women. I threw away the gifts that could have driven me to obtain a doctorate in a scientific pursuit or to write the Great American Novel or to become a noted songwriter or to become a teacher of English or History or Political Science or...but I was working in a factory, partying like mad and had just become lead singer of a drug-and-sex-and-metal bar band. I was married but I was sick of that and was ready to dump the wife and get back to chasing women again. I was wasting what gifts I had been given and had given up on finding any meaning in life. I just wanted to live by "if it feels good, do it!" I was an absolute failure as a human being.

Little to win, but nothing to lose?

Jesus was telling this story to a culture in which perceived standing in the community was dependent upon several factors. For a man's son to abandon his father and run off was a shame to the son but also a great shame upon the father. It gets worse:

14 But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. 15 Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 16 And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.

Jews had dietary laws given them by God via Moses and some animals were considered unclean to eat. In retrospect we can see that the creatures that God forbade his people to eat were sometimes dangerous to eat without modern pasteurization and refrigeration and thorough cooking and many of them were scavengers subsisting primarily on carrion. Because they were forbidden and because they were customarily kept by heathens, there was no more disgusting animal to a Jew than a pig! The Prodigal Son was living amongst pigs and trying to subsist on the scraps of scraps they left behind. He could not have been more disgraced in the eyes of the Jewish culture than this. He had truly hit rock bottom. I could understand this, because when I made the decision to leave my wife and child to be a rock singer and get back into womanizing I was about to disgrace myself terribly. What kind of man dumps his wife and child to go wild with sex and drugs and rock and roll? I'd made up my mind to do just that. They called me The Caveman. Well, I was going to live up to that name and then some!!!

17“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, 19 and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”’

My wife had been a friend and one night, stoned, we wound up going to bed. She was supposed to be on the pill. She was either forgetful or lying. She got pregnant. I was defnitely NOT looking to get married, heck, I had two other girlfriends at the same time. I was a dog. But if I was going to be a father, grudgingly, I decided to marry her. She treated me like a king until after the baby was born, at which point she turned into a shrieking harpy approximately half the time. Child or no child, I was not going to take it anymore. By dint of will I had not committed adultery yet. But she wound up going to a church and getting "saved" and suddenly she was trying to be a good wife. She was actually asking me what she could do to make me happy? Well, I figured it was too late and her sudden change of attitude was probably not going to last. After all, she had been pretty great before the baby came...I was just beginning to plot the best way to get away clean when...

When I was awakened after a night of working four hours overtime and hitting a bar after work only to be told a PREACHER was here to talk to me, actually, I would have preferred the police (I was pretty good at hiding my drugs) instead. I lit a cigarette and grabbed a beer and came out to listen to whatever line of baloney he had to feed me and then I would usher him out the door. It was March 13th, 1979. I was not yet 27 years old. He didn't come to preach to me, he came to ask me questions about what I believed. Pretty soon he had me so relaxed I decided to tell him the truth about what I believed in (not much) and how I had studied the Bible in college and understood it was written by itinerant priests and shepherds and that there was no way to know what was actual TRUTH. He got my mind turned towards my own actions rather than philosophy. We left theology and philosophy behind and he got me thinking about what I had done and what I intended to do. I remembered all the guys I had laughed at or pushed around. I remembered all the girls I had treated badly and used. I came to myself and realized I was a selfish and sinful wastrel. I realized that I was a sinner. The guy who used to confidently try to march right into the throne room of the unknown God suddenly knew better. I was not worthy to know God. I was a disaster of a human being.

20 “And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

I was not worthy. I knew I was sinful. This stranger, this older man sitting in my living room had managed to allow me to lead myself to the knowledge of my own shortcomings and selfishness. He never told me one thing I had done wrong, he simply asked me questions and I talked myself right into Hell. If there was a Hell, I was going there. What had I done to myself?!

22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring[b] out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. 23 And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; 24for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.

Jesus Christ never made sense to me. Why would one guy dying on a cross back in the time of the Caesars mean a darn thing to me? But Pastor Wood used the Bible to show me that mankind had all sinned. It wasn't just that I was a sinner, but rather that EVERYONE was a sinner and surely no man could possibly atone for all that sin...but God could. So the sins of man that began with Adam required man to suffer and die and be cursed and only God could actually withstand the burden of bearing all the sins of all mankind. Only God could live in a human body and not only not sin but also always do exactly the right thing. So God as the Son of God was born into the world, Jesus Christ, the Son of Man able to atone for Adam and all of his offspring and the Son of God able to raise Himself up from death. Jesus did nothing but good, always did exactly what the Father told Him to do and willingly took the shame and drank the cup of God's wrath for the totality of the sins of mankind, suffered the separation from the Father and Spirit of God while representing that sin and died. When He rose again, He came to see the disciples and then finally they all understood. Jesus had to die as the Lamb of God. Then in rising again to Heaven He gave the Holy Spirit of God to all believers. By faith in Christ and His atonement, the Spirit of God would come into a fallen sinful man and live within him. This is being born again.

I believed in Jesus Christ and His atonement for me. Suddenly a peace washed all the way through me, a flood of healing to a wound I didn't know existed. Before I even prayed with this pastor to accept Christ as my Savior my heart had already yielded to God and He had already transformed me. I had been dead inside and now I was alive in a way I had never known.

I went to church on the 18th of March with long hair and a full beard, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers. I began reading the New Testament through with a joint in one hand and a beer in the other. Seriously. The second time I went to church I wore nice clothes. One of the men of the church gave me a brand new expensive leather-bound Bible. They all had short hair and no one had a beard. I asked Pastor Wood why no one had long hair or a beard. Didn't Jesus have long hair and a beard? He told me it was a tradition of the church and I would be a Christian whether I cut my hair or not. Since I didn't have to do it, I did it, I cut my hair and shaved my beard like all the other guys. On April 1st of 1979 I got baptized.

John 3:16 - 21 - For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”

I was a bad man. I corrupted innocents, I sold illegal drugs, I betrayed people, I drove drunk, I did whatever I could get away with to please myself. I made a lame attempt to be a respectable man with a wife and child but had decided to forget that stuff and go back to just having fun and partying hearty. Then Jesus Christ became real to me and God's Spirit was born within me and I was actually a new creature.

Not that I have been perfect since I became a Christian. But my wants and desires changed. I still had the desires of the flesh, but there was a longing on the inside to do right and serve God. I was not comfortable doing wrong anymore. I preferred doing right. I wanted to be a servant of God. The thing I had always feared about becoming a Christian was that I would become a robot with God having some hypnotic control over me. Instead I was never so free and full of joy than the moment I was saved. I suddenly had peace that I didn't know I was missing and I finally knew that life had purpose and meaning. God made me and now I belonged to Him, I was an accepted Son in the family of God!

Everybody is NOT a child of God. Everybody was given life from God. But we are born into sin and are naturally sinners. Anyone who has been a parent knows you don't have to teach kids to disobey and get into trouble, you have to teach them to obey and watch them to keep them out of trouble! Even though I was a bad man, I was also that inquisitive child who wanted to know Truth. I had given up searching, but God had not given up on me. He wasn't going to let me get away with breaking my family to pieces without giving me a chance to understand and repent. I did understand and I did repent!

Most of the top Darwinists are atheopaths who hate God. They hate God because of the words I quoted earlier, above, from John chapter 3. Although the evidence doesn't support Darwinism, the majority of those in charge of various organizations are either thoroughly brainwashed to not even question it, or they detest the concept of God and will believe anything, no matter how ludicrous, rather than acknowledge the Creator.

“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed."

I used to say that it made no sense to me that you could just say a prayer and suddenly you would belong to God. But saying a prayer means nothing. When in the Garden of Eden man made a decision to disobey God, that decision ruined the relationship between God and man. When I understood that Jesus was the Christ, I made a decision to trust Him and I was born again before I could even utter a prayer. It isn't a prayer, it isn't a magic formula, it is a decision. One decision is the fulcrum upon which your entire life is balanced. God or Self?

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Funny how easy it is to turn questions around on Darwinists. For instance, I have one commenter who kept sending me this long list of questions and I finally answered them, but he then restated the same question another way twice. Ugh. Why don't we find Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins in the same layers of sediment? Hey, we find whale kinds but perhaps they had not speciated to Dolphins yet back 4300 years ago. Rapid speciation fits the Creationist model quite nicely. Whale kinds speciated into various forms of whale, many of which can mate. Did you know that we have seen that the majority of non-baleen whale kinds can and do mate and mix? You have heard of the Wholphin, right? Did you know that bears of various "species" can and do mate? Polar Bears and Brown Bears and Grizzly Bears can and do mate from time to time. All sorts of dogs mate with each other, but can also mate with wolves. The Darwinist concept of what classification is and what species are is a bit off. We need to divide the world of organisms into created kinds - bara min - and then figure out who is related to whom.

A better question is how did Coelecanths disappear and reappear? They were supposedly an ancestor of modern fish and possibly a "fishapod" of sorts that lived 380 to maybe 80 million years ago and presumably then evolved into something else. Until 1938 when fishermen caught one off the coast of Africa near Madagascar. Now we know they are found not only off the African Coast but that there is another version of them living in Indonesian waters. The Wollemi Pine was extinct but now has been found. The Gladiator Fly. The Lazarus Rat. Dozens of specimens that appear in the fossil record and then disappear have been found living today. Now, if the fossil record is evidence for a world-wide flood, finding that some animals have changed, some have remained about the same and some have gone extinct is no big surprise. After all, several "species" of animals have gone extinct within the last 100 years. Passenger Pigeons. Marsupial Wolves. DoDo birds. On the other hand, the Crocodile is pretty much the same as it was when captured in fossil form and so are dragonflies, although they do not grow as large as they once did. How do Darwinists account for this slap in the face to evolution, when we can show that the supposedly ancient ancestors who were stepping-stones to modern animals are still around, while the transitional forms from one animal to another are not found? Has there been even one true transitional form found, where we see systems or organs beginning to evolve, some kind of stepping-stone from one thing to another? I do not know of one example of a creature that actually qualifies. Commenters will probably mention a few that we know are simply a type of animal that is fully developed and stands alone.

Just so you know, classification of organisms is descriptive rather than prescriptive. We can observe and test and figure out things that Linnaeus never could have, because we can now read DNA and understand a great deal about reproduction he could not possibly have known. Baraminologists will require many years to identify clearly the primary kinds and classify their offspring properly, continuing the task Linnaeus began long ago. Creationists are not trying to destroy the work of Linnaeus, we are just continuing the work he started.

Although Blyth, a Creationist, was the first to coin the term "natural selection", a pioneer in the Darwinist world was Alfred Russell Wallace, a man who soon came to doubt the sufficiency of natural selection as a driver of evolution.

"Contemplating butterflies was among the considerations that drove evolutionary theory’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, to doubt the sufficiency of natural selection to account for the most wondrous aspects of animal life. Like lepidopterist and novelist Vladimir Nabokov a half-century later, Wallace noted the astonishing, gratuitous artistry with which butterflies adorn their wings.In The World of Life, Wallace wrote of how he could satisfyingly account for this only as a feature intended by design “to lead us to recognize some guiding power, some supreme mind, directingand organizing the blind forces of nature in the production of this marvelousdevelopment of life and loveliness" - David Klinghoffer, page 16, The Case for Intelligent Design in a Nutshell Chrysalis

"In Act I, the focus is on the mind-blowing magical routine by which the caterpillar enters into the chrysalis, dissolves into a buttery blob and swiftly reconstitutes itself into a completely different insect, a butterfly.

A cute graphic sequence shows, by way of analogy, a Ford Model T driving along a desert road. It screeches to a stop and unfolds a garage around itself. Inside, the car quickly falls to pieces, divesting itself of constituent parts that spontaneously recycle themselves into an utterly new and far more splendid vehicle. A sleek modern helicopter emerges from the garage door and thumps off into the sky."

Darwinists cannot answer so many basic questions. One of the baseless charges made in the comments thread is that I don't depend upon evidence when making posts. Au contraire! The posts I make usually consist primarily of evidence and arguments about that evidence. The commenters are the ones using derision and asking the same questions over and over as if they had not been answered. Well, let's see you commenters step up to the plate and answer some questions as if you actually had any answers...

Creation.com has challenged Darwinists to answer 15 important questions and I have excerpted the post below and a blow-by-blow dissection of the questions and the failed attempts to answer them. Questions 1-8 are thoroughly covered below the first article:

A grass-roots movement to challenge the anti-Christian dogma of evolution

“Question evolution!” is off to a great start. The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), which is one of the largest non-denominational, grassroots church lobbies in America and speaks on behalf of over 43,000 churches, is promoting the campaign. With so many churches involved, there is going to be a whole lot of questioning of evolution going on! Get involved yourself and get your church involved as well—let us work together to spread the truth.

The campaign involves people empowering people to stand firm together against the evolutionary indoctrination so rampant in our schools, universities and media. You can encourage your friends to ‘Question evolution’—especially if you are a student who is being force-fed evolutionary dogma.

Students certainly should question Darwinism in their schools and encourage others to do it too—after all, don’t teachers urge students to “question everything”? Students have a right to question the evolutionary pseudoscience peddled to them...

… grass-roots revolt against the force-feeding of everyone with evolutionary ‘there-is-no-need-for-God’ thinking.

15 Questions summary

Note to would-be evolution defenders: please read the full brochure and linked articles before attempting to answer the questions, otherwise you will likely be wasting your time boxing at shadows.

How did life with specifications for hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?

How did the DNA code originate?

How could copying errors (mutations) create 3 billion letters of DNA instructions to change a microbe into a microbiologist?

Why is natural selection taught as ‘evolution’ as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life?

How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed?

How did multi-cellular life originate?

How did sex originate?

Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years?

How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality?

Why is evolutionary ‘just-so’ story-telling tolerated as ‘science’?

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?

Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as the operational science?

Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Have Darwinists tried to answer these? Let's look at the first attempts:

Note: many of the answers published here cover far more ground than the pamphlet could, since it necessarily dealt with the topics in an abbreviated form.

General Objections: These are objections which may deal with the pamphlet in general.

The more our biological knowledge expands, the more problems evolution has.

Objection 1: These questions are only unanswerable because our science isn’t advanced enough.

Rebuttal: But if science has not yet advanced, then how could they possibly know what can be answered in the future? They tend to discount predictive prophecy, at least when it’s in the Bible. If more questions about evolution were answered by scientific advance, the skeptics may have a point. But exactly the opposite has been true in the past. The more our biological knowledge expands, the more problems evolution has. For example, Darwin thought that the cell was just a blob of goo; now we know it is a miniature city with advanced nanotechnology, including machines and factories.

Objection 2: CMI uses a misleading definition of evolution. Evolution is only the change in allele frequency in a population over time.

The evolutionist Gerald Kerkut defined this as ‘the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.’1 This is a perfectly justifiable definition, and one that secular scientists would agree with—and this is what the dispute is about!

Objection 3: Even if science cannot explain the origin of life, to say that God must have done it is an argument from ignorance.

Rebuttal: We do not argue from what we don’t know, but from what we do know about the nature of the information encoded in the DNA, the complexity of life, etc. Our argument is, to quote from a previous response:

“In objects ofknownorigin, there are certain features—specified complex information—that occur only in those made by an intelligent designer (or an intelligently designed program). So by the normal analogical reasoning we use in science, when we see these features in an object where the origin is unknown, we can likewise conclude that this object had an intelligent designer.

“These features are those that an archaeologist would use to determine whether an object was designed by an intelligent designer, or that a SETI devotee would use to argue that a signal from space came from an intelligent alien, or whether a ballot or card game was fixed, or whether a sequence of letters was the result of intelligence or monkeys on a keyboard.

“In the first two cases above, it would be perverse to complain that the archaeologist didn’t discuss whether the object’s designer itself had a designer, or that the SETI researcher didn’t tell us who designed the alien. It would be even sillier to argue from this that we should simply drop the idea of design, and conclude that the object or hypothetical space signal had no designer.”

Saying, “We don’t know, but evolution did it somehow,” on the other hand, is an argument from ignorance aka ‘evolution of the gaps’.

Objection 4: Many of these questions involve things that are very improbable. But we know that improbable events happen all the time.

Objection 5: CMI uses quote mining, citing scientists as part of their argument against evolution even though these scientists are evolutionists. CMI quotes scientists out-of-context.

Rebuttal: Any quote that is less than the entire work of which it is a part could be smeared as ‘out of context’. We take care not to take any quote in a manner that is other than what would be intended in the context. It is acceptable to use ‘hostile witness’ quotes to show how even people who believe evolution admit its difficulties.

An example of a genuinely out-of-context quote would be Darwin’s on the eye, where Darwin was talking about its seeming absurdity but then said that after all it was quite easy to imagine that the eye could be built step-by-step (in his opinion, with which we obviously disagree). This is why it’s on our Don’t Use page, one of the most read on our site (and even praised by Richard Dawkins himself).

Some of our opponents seem to think that quoting an evolutionist who has conceded a problem with evolution (even if he actually made such a concession) is ‘quoting out of context’ simply because the evolutionist would not agree with our position in toto. But this is a quite bizarre understanding of misquoting.

1. How did life originate?

Answer 1: Abiogenesis is not relevant to the discussion of evolution—it is a separate topic (this has been a very common claim).

Rebuttal: No one claimed that abiogenesis was irrelevant to the evolution debate until evolutionists realized they were losing the debate on it. Indeed, abiogenesis is also often called ‘chemical evolution’ (see Natural selection cannot explain the origin of life and here just one example of a paper by evolutionists proving the point, titled, “On the applicability of Darwinian principles to chemical evolution that led to life”, International Journal of Astrobiology3:45-53, 2004). It doesn’t matter how well one can or can’t explain how the first life could evolve, if you can’t explain how it got there in the first place, the theory is literally dead in the water (or the (non-existent) primordial soup, as the case may be). Notice also that, as we stated clearly above, creationists believe in changing allele frequencies over time. Therefore, since both sides claim this as part of their model, the debate must lie outside this area. Hence, the origin of life is fair game for discussions on whether or not evolution is true.

“It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account.

“Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”2

If there’s no way for the DNA code to come about via natural processes, evolution is impossible.

If there’s no way for the DNA code to come about via natural processes, evolution is impossible. A huge problem is this: the DNA information requires complex decoding machines, including the ribosome, so it can be decoded into the specifications to build the proteins required for life, including enzymes. But the information required to build ribosomes is itself encoded on the DNA. So DNA information can’t be decoded without products of its translation, forming a ‘vicious circle’. And decoding machinery requires energy from ATP, built by ATP-synthase motors, built from instructions in the DNA decoded by ribosomes … ‘vicious circles’ for any materialistic origin theory.

Answer 2: Originally, life used RNA instead of DNA to encode information.

Rebuttal: First, where is the evidence for this, such as fossilized ancestral RNA life? Second, the RNA world hypothesis is fraught with difficulties. RNA is even less stable than DNA, and that is saying something—about a million DNA ‘letters’ are damaged in a typical cell on a good day, which then requires repair mechanisms to be in place (another problem for origin-of-life scenarios). And it is extremely unlikely that the building blocks for RNA would come about by undirected chemical interactions, and even if this happened, it would be even more improbable that the building blocks would self-assemble into any RNA molecule, let alone an informational one. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. See this article for more details, which discusses the objections of a major origin-of-life researcher to the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis.

Answer 3: It is disingenuous to argue from the current DNA code, because the original code would have been much simpler.

Rebuttal: This is most disingenuous. So many evolutionists have appealed to the common DNA code to “prove” common ancestry. But now they are claiming that the first life had a different code not possessed by any living creature! But how could we go from the hypothetical simpler coding system to the current one? It would be like switching keys on a computer keyboard—the messages would become scrambled (as anyone who is accustomed to a QWERTY keyboard who has tried to use a non-QWERTY Latin keyboard would know only too well).

Actually, it has long been known that there are exceptions to the code, as we have pointed out (see The Unity of Life) and that is a problem for evolutionists. Richard Dawkins was recently stumped when “ life-creator Craig” Venter pointed out that there were different codes—Dawkins has long taught that evolution was supported by a single code and used this to argue for the single (evolutionary, of course) origin of all life.

There is a certain minimum amount of information which would have to be encoded for any living thing to survive. Currently, the self-replicating organism with the least amount of genetic information is the Mycoplasma genitalium with 580,000 ‘letters’ coding for 482 proteins. But this can only survive as a parasite, so non-parasitical life would have to encode even more information. See How simple can life be?

Answer 4: The question of how the modern code emerged from these early predecessors is evolution itself. Random deviations in the nucleic acid structure would change the by-product produced, if the by-product was more efficient at replicating, it would overwhelm less efficient codes. This gradual change in the complexity of the underlying code is useful in explaining many aspects of biological theory. Such as why RNA is used as an intermediate between DNA and protein synthesis.

Rebuttal: Random deviations would randomly change the “by-product produced”, so they would disrupt all the proteins encoded. RNA is used as an intermediate because it is more labile; it’s optimal for the short time frames needed for cell communications. It is a hopeless candidate for hypothetical eons in a primordial soup.

Answer 5: The words ‘code’ and ‘language’ are only metaphors when applied to the DNA code, and they have no reality outside our own mental constructs. In reality, the whole thing is dependent on chemical properties.

Rebuttal: Secular scientists refer to the nucleobases of DNA as ‘letters’, so it’s hardly original to us. And we would agree that the workings of the code are due to chemical properties—we are not vitalists (see also Naturalism, Origins and Operational Science. But this doesn’t explain the origin of the code. Similarly, we believe that the workings of computer decoders can be explained totally by the laws of semi-conductor electron levels and other electrical properties, but these laws didn’t make the computer. Should we say then that there is no difference between a 500 GB hard drive and an old 2 MB one, because it has no reality outside our mind? Also, this is a rather petty thing to dispute, since it does not address any of the arguments from the pamphlet. One wonders why we received several objections of this nature.

Answer 6: It is easy to create amino acids and the building blocks for RNA by running an electrical charge through mineral-rich water.

3. How could mutations—accidental copying mistakes—create the huge volumes of information in the DNA of living things?

Answer 1: If only eight mutations per year were passed on for three billion years, that gives 3 gigabytes of information.

It is becoming the consensus even among evolutionist geneticists that mutations are like spelling mistakes in an instruction manual, which overwhelmingly degrade information.

Rebuttal: This assumes that those information-gaining mutations occur—which hasn’t been shown. Second, as a population grows larger, it is harder to fix new mutations in the population, because the cost of substitution is greater (this is Haldane’s Dilemma).3 Third, it assumes that the mutations that will be fixed are the sort that create new structures, such as lungs, feathers and wings. But it is becoming the consensus even among evolutionist geneticists that mutations are like spelling mistakes in an instruction manual, which overwhelmingly degrade information. These changes can be adaptive (helpful to survival or ‘beneficial’) in certain circumstances, but they are still heading in the wrong direction to make evolution tenable. This includes antibiotic resistance, wingless beetles on windswept islands, blind fish in caves, and chloroquine resistance in malarial parasites. A recent paper shows that even the “beneficial” mutations work against each other—it’s called antagonistic epistasis.

Answer 2: Computer models have shown how mutations can lead to large-scale change.

Rebuttal: Every computer simulation of information-gaining mutations known to us stacks the deck in favour of evolution and in no way simulates what actually happens in real life. You might as well argue from the computer game Spore (although some do). See the articles on genetic algorithms and Dawkins’s Weasel program at our Natural Selection Q&A, as well as the more sophisticated Mendel’s Accountant, which does simulate (model) the real world genetics of living organisms. We know that mutations break things—and it’s far easier to break something than to make it.

Note also, that the issue is not the size of the change: dogs and cabbages both exhibit enormous variety, but they are still dogs (wolves, coyotes, German shepherds, etc.) and cabbages (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, etc.). These changes can occur within an animal or plant type (kind/baramin). Evolutionists need to find a mechanism for ‘nature’ to invent new genetic instructions for complex new features such as feathers for reptiles, if evolution did really change a reptile into a bird, for example.

Answer 3: Using words such as ‘accidental’ and ‘mistakes’ is misleading and misses the point entirely.

Rebuttal: Again, this sort of language is used by secular scientists, so take it up with them. But an assertion is not an argument—our opponents didn’t even defend this assertion. Carl Sagan, an ardent evolutionist, admitted: “ … mutations occur at random and are almost uniformly harmful—it is rare that a precision machine is improved by a random change in the instructions for making it.”4 How can random changes be anything but ‘accidental’ and ‘mistakes’?

Well so far our evolution defenders have not delivered the goods. Keep tuned for the next installment of attempts to answer the 15 questions.

Further reading

Questions 4–8

Published: 14 September 2011(GMT+10)

Here we continue our appraisal of various attempts to answer our 15 Questions for Evolutionists. We’ve compiled many of the answers that we’ve received to date (paraphrased to cover as many versions of the answer we’ve received as possible), along with our refutations.

4. Why is natural selection, a principle recognized by creationists, taught as ‘evolution’, as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life?

Demonstrating some example of natural selection is not demonstrating ‘evolution in action’ because no new genetic specifications are being created by natural selection.

Answer 1: It is disingenuous for creationists to claim to accept natural selection and not ‘macroevolution’, since the cumulative effect of the former leads to the latter.

Rebuttal: Actually, there is not one undisputed example of one structure arising gradually through natural selection. But if natural selection was the engine for evolution, we should have many examples of this happening. Rather, every example of natural selection that we have shows that it is a conservative force which specializes creatures to be better adapted for their environment. This involves a loss of information; for example, a population of bears in a cold climate losing information for short and medium-length fur (see How information is lost when creatures adapt to their environment).

The major issue here is that natural selection does not create any genetic information, so ‘natural selection’ is not the same as evolution. Demonstrating some example of natural selection is not demonstrating ‘evolution in action’ because no new genetic specifications are being created by natural selection. So there is nothing disingenuous about creationists accepting natural selection but not molecules-to-molecular-biologists evolution. However, it is disingenuous of evolutionists to continually equate natural selection with evolution.

However, high-profile evolutionists themselves have long recognized that ‘macroevolution’ is not just a matter of more ‘microevolution’; it is qualitatively different (so CMI advises against using these terms, which tend to create confusion). In November 1980 a conference of some of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, billed as ‘historic’, was held at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History on the topic of ‘macroevolution’. Reporting on the conference in the journal Science (Vol. 210(4472):883–887, 1980.), Roger Lewin wrote:

“The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.”

Francisco Ayala (Associate Professor of Genetics, University of California), was quoted in the same article as saying:

“… but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.”

Answer 2: There are over 100 new mutations for every child born. It is inevitable that evolution would happen with this rate of mutation. Those with the best mutations survive and reproduce.

Rebuttal: We’ve noted the mutation rate—and that it’s a huge problem for evolution. 100 mutations is actually the lowest (unrealistically low) possible number of new mutations per person, and that’s already extremely problematic for evolution. You see, in the evolutionary view, there have been 100 new mutations for every child for millions and millions of years. That’s billions of mutations.1 This also collapses a common argument for human-ape similarity: why should there be any similarity at all in the alleged five or six million years since their alleged common ancestor (but see also Evolutionists abandon the idea of 99% DNA similarity between humans and chimps).

When a person reproduces, his genes as a whole (half of them) are passed on, with both beneficial and non-beneficial mutations. It’s not as if a certain gene gets selected—it’s the group of genes that the person has. Most mutations are nearly neutral, emphasis on nearly. We don’t need to worry about the really catastrophic mutations being passed on most of the time; they often result in the death of the individual or otherwise prevent reproduction (natural selection operates here to remove the lethal ones, thus acting as a conserving force).

But most mutations aren’t like that—the person can survive. The deleterious effect may be so small that it’s imperceptible by itself. But add up thousands, hundreds of thousands, of those mutations, and you have a substantially ‘less fit’ individual than someone from the first generation. This person isn’t an example of evolution—he’s an example of devolution. He’s more likely to have problems like allergies and immune system disorders, he’s more likely to have trouble reproducing, and he’s probably got a shorter lifespan (without modern medical help), just for starters. And it gets worse for his descendants, because eventually all these mutations build up to an unsustainable level, and we get a situation that Dr John Sanford, geneticist, describes in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome (see our review):

“When selection is unable to counter the loss of information due to mutations, a situation arises called ‘error catastrophe’. If not rapidly corrected, this situation leads to the eventual death of the species—extinction! In its final stages, genomic degeneration leads to declining fertility, which curtails further selection (selection always requires a surplus population, some of which can then be eliminated each generation). Inbreeding and genetic drift then take over entirely, rapidly finishing off the population. The process is an irreversible downward spiral. This advanced stage of genomic degeneration is called ‘mutational meltdown’. Mutational meltdown is recognized as an immediate threat to all of today’s endangered species. The same process appears to potentially be a theoretical threat for mankind” (p. 41).

5. How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Answer 1: There’s no reason to think that the first life was as complex as today’s—the simplest forms would be extinct by now, out-competed by the more complex modern forms. A self-replicator can be as simple as a strand of six DNA nucleotides. These self-replicators set the stage for evolution to begin whether or not you call these molecules ‘life’.

Answer 2: Furthermore, looking at the biochemical processes in detail at a moment in time does not indicate the evolutionary history of an organism. Scaffolding is a means to develop a process. Furthermore, evolution is established on the macroscopic level through morphology as well as on the molecular level with genetics. As the understanding of biochemistry proceeds (as it is a much younger science), a better understanding will develop. Furthermore, as Michael Behe learned at the Dover trial, there is a lot known about the evolution of proteins, such as with the immune system.

Rebuttal: Lots of assertions here with little to back them up. Taking each sentence in turn:

In one sense, it is good to see that some evolutionists have finally abandoned the discredited “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”argument applied to biochemistry. But this also exposes the inconsistency of a major evolutionary argument: supposedly the many biochemical similarities prove evolution from a common ancestor with these features. But then it turns out that the ancestor didn’t have these features at all! E.g., all life uses DNA because of common ancestry, but then this common ancestor didn’t use DNA. Or, there is a common pentadactyl (five-digit) limb pattern in all tetrapods, because they all came from a common ancestor that walked up on the land from the sea. But the usual candidates for this common ancestor don’t have five digits—Acanthostega had eight, while Ichthyostega had seven, although all of these, including the much hyped Tiktaalik, have been trumped by more recent fossil evidence.

Scaffolding is really the “spandrel” argument by Lewontin and Gould.2 Yet there is no further evidence presented.

The morphological evidence is dealt with elsewhere, and is a change of subject.

There is yet another quasi-prophetic appeal to what we will understand in the future, but this is of course a tacit admission that evolutionists don’t have an answer now.

Lots of rubbish has been talked about the Dover Trial, where a previously unknown judge became the darling of the liberal media and evolution-pushing organizations by parroting the ACLU submission in his verdict. See our analysis.

Answer 3: It’s not a lucky accident!

Rebuttal: And if the question was, “Was the origination of new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in a sequence, a lucky accident?”, that would be an answer to our question, although still only an unsupported assertion. Either it’s a lucky accident or it’s designed. Selection can’t work before these already exist in a functional form—it’s pure chance. But the question was how did they come about, and this didn’t even attempt to answer that one.

6. Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed?

Answer 1: They don’t, but to say they are is a mere argument from ignorance.

Rebuttal: If evolutionists admit they don’t know, isn’t that by definition an admission that they’re arguing from ignorance? Also, as stated in part 1, the argument from design is based on what we do know.

Answer 2: If there were a designer, we should see designs tending toward simplicity, not complexity. Yet that is the opposite of what we see.

Rebuttal: So life is too complex for it to be designed? This is a new one! In any case, this is only a form of argument from bad design, refuted in a number of articles under What about claims of ‘bad design’?

Actually, the critic also forgets the Fall, so we should see degeneration, as pointed out in our book By Design. We have previously noted that many parasites are genetically depleted compared to free-living equivalents—see articles under How does biblical Christianity explain the origin of poisons, and pathogenic bacteria and viruses. Thus it should be called devolution not evolution (a downhill change is consistent with the biblical Creation-Fall model). This was backed up by an interview with famous evolutionist Lynn Margulis in Discover April 2011:

“Both the treponema that cause syphilis and the borrelia that cause Lyme disease contain only a fifth of the genes they need to live on their own. Related spirochetes that can live outside by themselves need 5,000 genes, whereas the spirochetes of those two diseases have only 1,000 genes in their bodies. The 4,000 missing gene products needed for bacterial growth can be supplied by wet, warm human tissue. This is why both the Lyme disease borrelia and syphilis treponema are symbionts—they require another body to survive.”

Answer 3: Vestigial organs provide evidence of evolution: these are structures which once had a purpose but no longer do.

Just because we don’t know of a function for a certain organ or system doesn’t mean there is none.

Furthermore, it’s ironic that this critic accused us of using an “argument from ignorance”, then did just that! Just because we don’t know of a function for a certain organ or system doesn’t mean there is none. One important and recently discovered function of the appendix—a safe house for beneficial bacteria—should have been a lesson. At least, that should have been the argument 100 years ago. Today, we know better. See also Do any vestigial organs exist in humans?.

Answer 4: There are structures that would be horrendously designed, but they’re easy to explain if they evolved. The laryngeal nerve is one example of this.

Answer 5: It’s very lucky that everything works out just so it looks like it were designed, but if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be around to notice it.

Rebuttal: It’s a simple explanation—except it’s not an explanation. The analogy that we have borrowed to show the inadequacy of the explanation is if I were surrounded by an execution squad comprising expert marksmen, each person with a rifle, and they all fired, but I was still alive afterwards, it’s equally true that if it hadn’t happened that way I wouldn’t be around to observe it, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be surprised by it. So that we exist doesn’t make it any less surprising that we do.

7. How did multi-cellular life originate?

Answer 1: It was beneficial for cells to work together.

Rebuttal: That may be true, but while that may tell us why such a fully developed system is advantageous, it says nothing about how such a system originated, and what benefits the incomplete stages would have.

Answer 2: Colonies of cells that cooperated were the first step.

Rebuttal: There is a huge difference between a colony of single-celled organisms and a true multi-celled organism, and no known mechanism would enable an organism to make that leap. For example, there is a big jump between selection for single cell reproductive success and that for integrity of a multicellular organism. In complex creatures, great reproductive success of a single cell type is usually called cancer. See Evolution of muticellularity: what is required?

8. How did sex originate?

Answer 1: Sexual reproduction allows for evolution at a much faster pace than asexual reproduction. Organisms that exchanged DNA were thus able to evolve out of situations that might have killed their asexual counterparts.

Rebuttal: Another answer which tells why but not how. Creationists can explain the origin of fully functioning sexual reproduction, from the start, in an optimal and genetically diverse population, at the hand of an intelligent Creator. Once the mechanisms are already in place, they have these advantages. But simply having advantages doesn’t remotely explain how they could be built from scratch. The hypothetical transitional forms would be highly disadvantageous, so natural selection would work against them. Sexual reproduction involves fine tuning on both the molecular level (so DNA from two individuals can combine into a new one) and the macroscopic level: in many cases, the male and female genitalia are precisely tuned so one could fit the other, meaning that they could not have evolved independently.

It’s also only partially right: yes, because of recombination, sexual reproduction allows much variability. But it also allows a successful organism to pass on only half the genes to any given offspring (and in a stable population by definition, there is only one offspring per parent). This acts as a conservative force. This is a good thing, because most mutations are harmful, and it’s a good thing they are not passed on. But for evolution, it’s a problem since any putatively beneficial mutation has a 50% chance of not being passed on. Also, sexual reproduction allows these harmful genes, if recessive, to be shielded by a backup copy.

Answer 2: Sex depends on both the male and the female. Any incompatibilities would cause sterility and would be selected against.

Rebuttal: Sex is indeed dependent on the actions of the male and the female, but unless you’re some kind of neo-Lamarckian, that isn’t going to lead to complementary structures. The fact that natural selection will weed out sterile individuals doesn’t explain how functioning sexual reproduction came to be, since there’s a lot more ways to make something that doesn’t work than something that does. Incidentally, many responses to this question show more confidence about the origin of sex than Dawkins had. See Evolution of Sex (Refuting Evolution 2 chapter 11).

Reader’s comment:

Mark J., Australia, 13 September 2011
Great article. Its only a pity that these kinds of questions don't make the public arena. But the answer to that is obvious: the evolutionary logic, or lack of, is so deficient that no evolutionist wants it exposed to the light of day, or light of truth. Keep up the great work.

Further reading

References

According to theory, the fixation rate of neutral mutations is roughly proportional to the mutation rate. Therefore, 1,000,000 years / 20 years/generations = 50,000 generations. 50,000 generations x 100 mutations/generation = 5 billion mutations, more or less, in 1 million years. This is a complete overturning of the genome! Why is there any similarity between chimpanzees and man left after a supposed 6 million years of separation? Return to text.

See Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C., The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 205(1161):581–598, 1979. Return to text.

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Actually, Creationists have got answers Darwinists have not begun to find and we can explain the Universe pretty much soup-to-nuts while Darwinists still grope around trying to find an explanation for why anything exists at all. We actually have people who call themselves Astrobiologists, but if we did find life on another planet that would just be one more place where secular scientists couldn't explain how it came to be. Later on this fall I will share with readers the almost pathetically lame argument supposed mega-brain Stephen Hawking uses to explain how the Universe came to be. For now, let's see if any commenters have any comprehensible answers at all to the questions. I am thinking probably NOT!!!!

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour